f you’ve worked in communications and PR for long enough you’ll have encountered times when you’re challenged around ethics and diversity. An all-new UnAwards category for 2016 wants to shine a light on the good work being done in our industry to tackle these issues.

The city of Leeds is a cradle of learning with an established reputation as one of the leading university cities in the UK. So it was a perfect location to kick off the first of our UnAwards Winners Masterclasses.

We staged the unawards and gave away 15 awards. It was an occaion to celebrate but also to connect.

by Dan Slee

There’s a good line about no-one listening to the Prophet in their own land.

I love it because it’s true.

My last job was working in an Edwardian Town Hall. It was as a proud declaration of civic pride built on hardwork and the town’s leather industry. On the outside there were gargoyles carved into the stonework and broad carpeted stairs that led to oak doors of meeting rooms. Inside those public rooms there were fire places and portraits of long forgotten dignitaries.

Visitors impressed would quietly tell me how it must be lovely to work in such a building.

I suppose it is, I’d tell them.

What happens day-to-day gets taken for granted and overlooked. It’s human nature.

Over 140 entries poured into the UnAwards15 from across the UK and from as far afield as Norway.

Central government, local government, NHS, Police, Housing, Fire, Higher Education, third sector and the agency world all took part and our 14 external judges have had quite a task in getting down to our final shortlist.

The standard of your entries this year has been high. We know this because some of our judges are hard to impress, But impressed they were.

Our love and respect for this fabulous comms, PR, marketing and digital community, which we all exist in, just grows and grows and thank you so much for supporting the #UnAwards15.

We know that a common complaint from comms folk, and others for that matter, is a lack of recognition for their work.

Whether it’s a brilliant campaign, managing communications through a crisis or just turning up every day of the year and being the best you can be it’s not a lot to ask to get the odd ‘well done’ or ‘thank you’.

But it doesn’t happen often enough and that is the ultimate reason behind the comms2point UnAwards 15. To shine a light on the colleagues proudly flying comms flags across the sectors.

Now there’s only one thing better than being shortlisted for an award and that’s being nominated by someone else for an award. It’s a special thing. It means you’ve caught someone’s eye, demanded their attention or impressed them with your creativity, doggedness, enthusiasm and skills.

Know someone like that? Then why not nominate them in the UnAwards 15.

When we dreamed-up the unawards we wanted something easy to enter, social, not in London and something that everyone could enter. The response has been truly staggering. Thank you. Sincerely. Here's the next steps.

Wow and we mean wow. We simply have been overwhelmed with the number of award entries we've had for our unawards.

We knew it was hotting up - our twitter antenae was telling us that you were pretty keen on the idea and yesterday, in true transfer deadline day style we saw the fruits of all that discussion result in over 200 award submissions.

You’ve thought about doing them but you haven’t quite got your act together. Here’s why we really think you should.

It’s super speedy to enter – you only need to write 400 words - you’d probably get that done in 60 minutes. That’s one hour – let me say that again – one hour to potentially win a good old bit of kudos for you, your team or the hard slog that you’ve done

Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to announce a whole new concept in the idea of comms awards.

Like you we've thought to ourselves about the good work that we've done that will go unheralded and that will never result in us having our picture taken next to a BBC Look North regional news presenter.

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